HOW DO I GO FASTER?
Good training and support is invaluable, says Phil
Burt spent 12 years as head of physio at British Cycling and five years as consultant physio at Team Ineos. philburtinnovation.co.uk
“He demonstrated that the placebo effect was worth an extra five per cent (lift in performance) for most...”
When the Olympic kit was dropped off with Team GB at the pre-Games camp – usually in Newport – and we headed to the velodrome, the times were always fast.
Is that because the kit was fast, or because the riders believed the kit would be fast? In mine and some others’ opinions, the placebo effect must have played some part.
Undeniably, some of the kit interventions at past Olympics have had a considerable effect on the lift seen in performances, but the returns on such ‘marginal gains’ have been diminishing in size in subsequent Olympic cycles. Nevertheless, the effect of new kit seems to maintain the same level of magnitude in performance improvement
– so one has to consider that the placebo effect as an important factor.
During my time working at British Cycling as head of physio, Dr Chris Beady presented to us. Dr Beady did a study at the velodrome for BBCHorizon in which he gave one set of riders a blue pill and the other set a red pill. Both were dummy pills with no active ingredient in them at all. However, the red pill group were told they had a substance in them that would make them go faster. And they did go faster.
Every single rider given the red pill went faster than they had done previously, compared with the blue pill group, where there was no overall change. In fact, what Dr Beady demonstrated during that experiment was that the placebo effect was worth an extra five per cent for most – a number backed up with good scientific research elsewhere in the field.
Personally, I’d be high-fiving you if you got a five per cent improvement after a 12-week hard training programme with all the cost and risk that that involves.
So the effect is there, but the big question is can you manipulate it? And is it ethical to do so? To be sure, we need a bit more detail.
Control vs effect
Firstly, let’s just take a moment to define a placebo control vs placebo effect. A placebo control is a condition during a scientific experiment that permits confidence that effects result from a treatment. A placebo effect is a positive outcome resulting from the expectation of a positive effect.
It is an adaptive psychophysiological mechanism (real) and it is triggered by a wide range of contextual cues. This is important because it is a potential means of enhancing an athlete’s performance.
However, saying to someone, ‘Do this and you’ll go faster’ is a breach of trust and you’re certainly on dubious ground if it’s not true.
It is effective, though, so how can a balance be achieved? The evidence may suggest you will respond well to something if it is well communicated. So you are likely to do better having been told, ‘You’d be surprised how effective this can be.’
However, the same message poorly communicated can be at the detriment of performance – a nocebo (meaning a negative placebo effect). So, imagine then how an anxious athlete hearing the words, ‘This should work…’ regarding a treatment or training plan will react. It’s easy to see how this might conjure up negative thought processes with underperformance being the result.
So it really comes down to one thing, and that’s belief. If you believe in your training programme, your coach, your kit and your setup, the science says you will perform better. Getting to the point where you do have that total belief is well worth the investment of time – and even money – because if someone offered you a piece of kit that could give you a five per cent lift in performance I’m pretty sure you’d take it!